Dublin | Intersport Elverys' Blog

Denis Hurley is one of the top GAA writers in the country and is a keen student and pre-eminent voice on the history of jerseys in the GAA

We don’t have access to any figures yet, but we’d be fairly confident in saying that Dublin top the county jersey sales charts – the combination of population and success sees to that.

Capitalising (pardon the pun) on this, not since 1998 have the Dubs had a shirt which has lasted for more than two years and twice in that time, 2009 and ’13, have jerseys lasted for just a year due to sponsor changes.

Unsurprisingly, given the marquee status of the county, O’Neills have almost always given Dublin something different. Year zero for GAA shirt ‘design’ is 1991, when extra lines were added to counties’ sleeves. Dublin did share that with a lot of other counties, but the jersey introduced in 1994 was something out of the ordinary and, while it would be copied by Clare, that wasn’t until 1998, when the Dubs had moved on.

Since then, pretty much every other strip worn by the Metropolitans has been in a style not utilised anywhere else – even the pedestrian-looking 2010 offering had unique shadow-striping. A very similar look featured on the just-departed 2014-15 kit, but that may have had something to do with the suddenness of AIG’s replacing Vodafone as sponsors and, in any case, the shade of blue – close, if not identical, to AIG’s – was a new departure.

Dublin created a lot of hype around the launch of the latest kit, and we must say we loved touches like the acknowledgment of what has gone before with the #drawnfromhistory hashtag.

While the flashes on the sleeves are the same as those featured on a lot of new O’Neills jerseys this year – Cork, Galway and Down sport them – the uniqueness comes from the collar, in two senses: most counties have been going for what O’Neills call the ‘Mandarin neck’ (basically a crew neck with an insert) of late, and secondly it’s a totally new style of collar, with the ‘v’ being shallower than seen before.

It’s the colour configuration which has drawn the most comment, though – white has usurped navy as the secondary hue on the jersey, harking back to before the 1970s, when sky blue and white were the county colours. It’s a fairly fresh look – if a bit Manchester City!

The shorts are the usual navy while the socks are also that colour (they have alternated between navy and sky blue in the past while), and white is only used for text. If the retro look was the idea, then white shorts and sky blue socks would have been a logical, if radical, approach (see pic 2).

Alternatively, they could have kept the usual look, with navy more prominent than white on the jersey (pic 3), but this would have been too safe, tried and trusted. If they were set on white for the collar and stripes on the jersey, then perhaps the best compromise would have been extending the Jack and Meg White (White Stripes, get it?) look onto the shorts and socks (pic 4)?

t’s certainly different and new, as we would expect from the Dubs, but certainly one that has caught the eye already this summer!

Check out more from Denis on Twitter @museumofjerseys and on his brilliantly detailed website prideinthejersey.com

Get the 2016 Dublin jersey at Elverys Intersport now in store or online! http://bit.ly/1SQIiYd

Since it was first founded in 1847 Elverys Sports has witnessed some of the most dramatic events in Irish history, and none more so than the 1916 Easter Rising, the centenary of which will be celebrated this weekend. Indeed, the Elverys Sports store on what was then Sackville Street in Dublin was caught up in a small way in the momentous happenings of that seismic period in the history of the country.

Cricket, once widely played across the country was in decline since the GAA had introduced Rule 27 – known ever since as “The Ban” – was still a popular enough in Dublin to have Elverys stock bats and accessories in the window of the store.

The location of the store so close to the main fighting going on at the GPO, meant Elverys were in the middle of the cross-fire and general destruction of the main street.

There was widespread looting on the street from the night of Monday the 24th and the Sinn Féin 1916 Rebellion Handbook, published by the Irish Times in 1917, describes children roaming the streets with sweets, toys and ‘hockey and golf sticks and all kinds of articles used in popular pastimes’, which would certainly suggest Elverys was a victim.

The Cricket Bat that Died for Ireland, a wonderful blog on Irish history, explains further what happened in those tumultuous days.

“The bullet lodged in the wood of the bat is a .303 calibre, which was used by the British Army for both their standard issue Short Magazine Lee Enfield rifles and also Lewis machine guns. The Irish Volunteers had about 900 1871 model Mausers, landed at Howth two years before, which used .45 calibre ammunition, so the bat was shot by a British gun. Rifle fire on Sackville Street was heaviest on the Tuesday of the Rising, before the fires began to spread on the Wednesday, so it’s possible, though not certain, that the bat was shot on that day.”

“Perhaps one of the reasons the cricket bat has captured so many people’s imaginations is the idea of such a symbol of ‘Britishness’ taking a bullet in the rebellion. Maybe the fact that the bullet came from a British weapon adds to the irony.”

Today, in close proximity to where the original Elverys store stood, the name proudly lives on in Dublin city centre in Arnotts where three great Irish companies – Arnotts, established in 1843, O’Neills, founded just two years after the Rising, and Elverys, have come together to commemorate that fateful week as can be seen below. The 1916 Jersey can be purchased in any of the nearly sixty Elverys stores the length and breadth of the Republic which the men and women of the Rising fought to bring about.

To celebrate our heritage, Elverys is giving 19.16% off all online purchases from Friday until Easter Monday at midnight. Check out Elverys.ie for full details.

THIS OFFER HAS ENDED.

Thanks to Mark Jenkins and Breda Malone for their assistance with photography and information for this article.

THE 2016 DUBLIN JERSEY – AN EVOLUTION IN STYLE

ELVERYS & 1916